Yesterday’s meditation in “My Utmost for His Highest” is one of the very few – perhap the only – instance where I believe Oswald Chambers got something majorly wrong. Here’s the Scripture reference and the first paragraph:
Take now thy son . . and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. — Genesis 22:2
Character determines how a man interprets God’s will (cf. Psalm 18:25-26). Abraham interpreted God’s command to mean that he had to kill his son, and he could only leave this tradition behind by the pain of a tremendous ordeal. God could purify his faith in no other way. If we obey what God says according to our sincere belief, God will break us from those traditions that misrepresent Him. There are many such beliefs to be got rid of, e.g., that God removes a child because the mother loves him too much – a devil’s lie! and a travesty of the true nature of God. If the devil can hinder us from taking the supreme climb and getting rid of wrong traditions about God, he will do so; but if we keep true to God, God will take us through an ordeal which will bring us out into a better knowledge of Himself.
DJ: God did not break Abraham from any tradition that misrepresented Him. God fulfilled in iconic form a requirement that He Himself laid down: In Paul’s words, “without shedding of blood is no remission [of sins]” – Heb 9:22. God required of Abraham that he give up his son, his only true heir, the son of God’s promise, as a sacrifice for sin. I agree He had no intention of having Abraham actually complete the act, but He had every intention of showing Abraham what was required for the forgiveness of sins. By letting the sacrifice proceed to the last possible moment, Abraham was given the opportunity to prove to God and to himself that his faith was genuine and complete. Once that was accomplished, God provided the sacrifice – an icon of the sacrifice that would be provided through the binding, scourging, and death of God’s own true Son, the Son of God’s promise, the Paschal Lamb slain for the sins of the world. The tradition was not meaningless, and it was not misrepresentative of God. Indeed this particular instance of the sacrifice definitively proves the nature and character of God: completely holy, completely perfect, and completely loving. And He calls us to become that, “to be conformed to the image of His Son” Who was that Lamb (Romans 8:29).
Chambers is correct when he says, “There are many such beliefs to be got rid of”. It’s just that the requirement for sacrifice – and our faith in God to provide it – is not one of those beliefs.
http://www.oswaldchambers.co.uk/classic/the-supreme-climb-2-classic/
They will rebuild the ancient ruins 
Agreed!
God has always from the very beginning intended to provide the way, and He promised to do it in a way that would definitively defeat the foe of all mankind. We who are locked in this temporal existence (temporarily, mind you) have difficulty with the way God deals with us because we are inclined to view and interpret events from the perspective of human limitations. That would include our bias to sin (and in our conceit exclaim, “I would never do it that way!”
It is hard to understand at first. How would we perceive the delay our Lord imposes upon the situation related in John’s gospel, chapter 11, where Jesus’ good friend Lazarus dies from some malady. Jesus knows what God is about, and as difficult as it is in this story of not just near death experience, but complete DOA by about four days, the glory of the promised Son, Sacrifice and Saviour is the point. God is about showing us His own precious Son Jesus, who is the fulfilment of the demand, a millennia before, for a dear son to be offered up as a sacrifice for sin. Such a sacrifice Abraham’s faith was truly willing to give, and it is Abraham’s faith we are to imitate. But at the fullness of time, God showed us His heart by sending Jesus, to accomplish what needed to be done as only He could do it: to raise the dead–Lazarus, along with all of us thoroughly dead in sin people–and to be the Son Whom God would raise from the dead. Jesus is clearly very familiar with death, and He makes it very clear that death will not have the LAST word, but it will have its say.
O Death, where is your sting?
O Hell, where is your victory?
O Church, come stand in the light–
Our God is not dead, He’s alive, He’s alive!
Christ is risen from the dead
Trampling over death by death
Come awake, come awake
Come and rise up from the grave
Christ is risen from the dead
We are one with Him again
Come awake, come awake
Come and rise up from the grave.
(from Matt Maher’s song Christ is Risen)
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